Long one of the forgotten oddities of American polity, the Electoral College – the body that directly decides presidential elections – jumped into the limelight in the bitterly contested presidential election of 2000. Some would argue, in fact, that it stole the show, handing George W. Bush the presidency, even though Al Gore won the popular vote.

Although rare, this disconnect between the popular and electoral vote is not without precedent. Three times prior to 2000 (in the presidential elections of 1824, 1876 and 1888), the Electoral College has overturned the popular vote. Since 2000, thousands have loudly criticized the Electoral College as obsolete and obstructive to democracy, citing the havoc it wreaked in our most recent election. They are right to complain. Although the Electoral College has a number of creative arguments in its defense, the reality is that it remains a vestigial, antiquated, and antidemocratic institution whose time has come.

The Electoral College is able to overturn the popular vote because representation in the Electoral College is divided by state, and currently, in every state but Nebraska and Maine, the winning political party in a state gets to designate all the state’s electors. If California votes Republican, for example, all 55 of its electoral votes go to President Bush, no matter how sizeable the Democratic and third-party minorities were in that state. Proponents of the Electoral College argue that this system is fair and necessary for a slew of reasons. First and foremost, they claim it helps to keep candidates from focusing entirely on large population centers. More electors per person go to small states than to large ones; today, Wyoming has one electoral vote for every 164,594 residents, while California has one per 616,848. Thus, small, rural states are much more important under the current system than they would be in a direct election. In fact, according to nationmanager.com, an online statistics database, in a one-person, one-vote election, a candidate could win the presidency simply by winning the 10 largest American cities. Without the Electoral College, candidates would simply ignore areas with low population densities, and, presumably, eventually sell off Montana to buy everyone in Philadelphia a Land Cruiser.

The argument, then, is that the Electoral College keeps candidates from focusing all their energies on certain areas of high strategic importance to their campaigns. But the present national fever over our handful of “swing states” has similar flaws. In fact, instead of neglecting certain sparsely populated areas in their campaigns, presidential candidates in this campaign are actively insulting entire states that they know they can’t win. In the second presidential debate, President Bush issued the following bon mot: “You talk about pay-go. I’ll tell you what pay-go means, when you’re a senator from Massachusetts, when you’re a colleague of Ted Kennedy: Pay-go means you pay, and he goes ahead and spends.” Massachusetts, here, is apparently a synonym for “bad place where money is used primarily to light Ted Kennedy’s cigars.”

But if Massachusetts doesn’t like how Bush has characterized it, what can it do? Its electoral votes are already practically committed to John Kerry, and Bush knows it. In a one-man, one-vote system, President Bush would never dare to insult a state in that way, because individual voters in Massachusetts could voice their anger at him. The Electoral College, far from curing regionalism and negligence toward large parts of the country, actively promotes and perpetuates these problems.

Besides, in reality, direct-democracy would not lead to the neglect of all but a few large cities. Vice President Gore won the popular vote by only about 500,000 in 2000, or approximately the population of Wyoming. Given these close margins, no presidential candidate would be foolish enough to ignore any state, no matter how small its population, because every vote would count

But these close margins of victory do leave presidents open to allegations of fraud in tight races, because it’s much easier to steal 500 votes (the margin of Bush’s victory in Florida, plus or minus 20,000) than 500,000. Moreover, people feel cheated in elections in which the popular vote is undermined. Bush has been called an illegitimate president through his entire presidency – some “mandate.” At the very least, without the Electoral College, the ubiquitous bumper stickers urging America to “Re-defeat Bush in 2004” would not exist today.

If this makes the Electoral College seem anti-democratic, that’s because it is. James Madison made this perfectly clear when proposing the Electoral College in Federalist No. 10. Madison believed that simple majority rule needed checks to prevent a passionate, mob-like majority from acting foolishly. He wrote, “a pure democracy... can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction.” Limiting the power of these factions, the 18th century version of the special interest group, served as the basis for the adaptation of the Electoral College. The Electoral College, say today’s Madisonians, works to limit the dangers of pure democracy. Since electors are not legally bound to vote for the candidate for whom they are designated to vote, they can resist the will of the people, should the people happen to decide to do something extremely impulsive (such as elect Al Gore).

But Madison formulated his argument that the Electoral College restrains a passionate and uncontrollable electorate before the rise of political parties. It simply no longer applies. Today’s electors aren’t chosen for their wisdom and high social rank, but rather for their blatant partisanship. In fact, today, being awarded an electorship is often a reward for years of faithful service to one party or another. Essentially, today’s electors aren’t putting a check on anybody’s “passions.”

Except maybe those of voters in non-competitive states. Low voter turnout is a logical result of the Electoral College system, given that a Republican (or independent) in Massachusetts or a Democrat (or independent) in Texas has absolutely no reason to show up on November 2nd besides a vague sense of patriotism. If we return presidential elections directly to the people, voters in non-swing states would finally have a substantive reason to vote.

Given the inherently anti-democratic nature of the system, it is time to retire the Electoral College to the dustbin of history. Created for a world where political parties held no sway, where the difficulty of transportation and communication on a national scale made it plausible that every state would attempt to elect a local favorite to the presidency, and where Americans identified more with their state than with their country, it is wildly out of place today. The aspersions its proponents cast on its alternatives are a little too wild-eyed to be taken seriously. The Electoral College is a political dinosaur. Now can we hurry up with that meteorite? u